Out There

Now Again;
2007

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It's a weird feeling to know what you like about a record while still
having a difficult time figuring out what it is, exactly-- or at least
finding a tidy way to categorize it.
Out There, the UK-based Heliocentrics' debut CD, has a slippery lineage: there's funk and Afrobeat, but it's too restless to stay on the groove for long, and whatever jazz there is-- mostly of the soul-fusion-era Blue Note ilk, with touches of free improv elasticity-- refuses to be completely straightforward. Throw in sideways hints of David Axelrod's orchestral jazz-rock, the United States of America's early psych electronics, and the odd Lalo Schifrin score, and Out There begins to resemble a period of time more than a sound. Even the op-art and Eurostile font-decorated cover, era-specific as it looks, seems stylistically non-committal.

When a track on Out There works, then, it works as a series of recognizable ideas that ricochet off one another and combine to subtly redefine whatever it means to sound like "the late 1960s." It helps that much of the material of the milieu that inspired this music was already occupied with its own shifting targets and avant-meets-populist tendencies, especially in the utilization of non-Western compositional ideas. You can hear it in tracks like "Joyride", which uses its halfway-krautrock groove to blur the lines between Eurasian and African exotica, and the Middle-Eastern melodies on "Before I Die", and "The American Empire", which find a place for suspense-film strings and amplified thumb piano alike.

If you have to find a specific niche for Out There, you may as well classify it as progressive jazz-funk of sorts-- drummer and de facto bandleader Malcolm Catto has a thing for intricate polyrhythms, and there's a certain improvisational looseness and experimentation here that goes a bit further beyond the no-nonsense grooves of most retro-soul bands. And while there's no shortage of stylistic inspirations to be heard here, the influence of Sun Ra stands out as one of the most significant, starting with the name of the band itself. "Age of the Sun", "The Zero Hour", and "Sirius B" all envision a version of the Arkestra replete with a stronger tendency to focus on the one-- imagine Clyde Stubblefield drumming his way through The Nubians of Plutonia.

Even as a live-band outfit, the Heliocentrics find a way to connect the dots in a particularly hip-hop way: most of the signifiers that Out There streamlines and fuses are production touchstones for a certain caliber of beat-junkie that arose sometime in the early-to-mid-90s, taking DJ Premier and Pete Rock's deep-funk and jazz obsessions further out into arcana. Think DJ Shadow, who provided the Heliocentrics' first high-profile appearance on his supremely genre-confused 2006 album The Outsider, where they concocted a sort of unplaceable jazz-folk-soul-blues hybrid on "This Time (I'm Gonna Try It My Way)". There's a lot less of that song's Boz-Scaggs-session-band feel to Out There, but the modular universal-pop tone, retrograde as it may seem, couldn't come from any other place than the unlikely connections that spring up between breaks from one dusty old LP to another.